Broken Shadows

by Tim Waggoner

  Michael’s eyes flew open and a scream tore free from his lips—a scream that might have been his, but just as easily might have belonged to a dead man named Clint. The studio lights spun in his vision, his knees buckled, and he felt himself begin to fall toward the floor.

  He had a Beethoven CD playing—the Symphony No. 9 in D minor—the volume turned up so high he could feel the steering wheel vibrating in time with the music. But as loud as it was, the symphony couldn’t drown out the whispers that tickled the inside of his ears. Whispers that grew louder and clearer with every mile he put behind him.

  He knew other tricks to shut the voices out, though. Lots of them.

  * * *

  “You want to touch it, don’t you? Go ahead; it can’t hurt you, child.”

  Michael was six years old, and he had never touched anything dead. Not unless you counted food that had once been alive, like hamburgers and fried chicken, but Aunt ‘Lena said that wasn’t the same.

  Once an animal’s been killed, reduced to hunks of meat, and then cooked, the tie to its spirit has been well and truly severed. Even then, if you’re sensitive enough, you sometimes catch an echo of its life when you eat it. That’s why a lot of folks like us are vegetarians.

  Michael looked down at the dead toad. It was tiny, little more than a baby, really. It lay on its back in the middle of the dirt path that led up to the front door of Aunt Elena’s trailer. Michael was responsible for the animal’s death. He’d been skipping down the path, singing the ABC song to himself, and hadn’t seen the little toad. Without meaning to, he’d stepped on the poor thing, mushing its guts to one side of its belly, leaving the other side flat. The toad had writhed for half an hour before it died. Michael had watched the entire time, on the verge of tears, but also morbidly fascinated. When the toad had finally passed on, he’d gone to get his aunt. She’d know what to do with it.

  He looked up at his aunt for confirmation, and she smiled, crow’s feet becoming deeper and more pronounced as she did. She was really his great-aunt, and while he didn’t know exactly how old she was, she was the oldest person he knew, which as far as he was concerned meant she was pretty old.

  Michael stretched his index finger toward the dead toad—he was nervous, but his finger didn’t tremble, remained rock-steady—and gently touched the bulging side of its abdomen. Its skin was soft, leathery, and still warm

  His vision went gray and he felt a small hot pinprick of pain between his eyes. He gasped, but he didn’t remove his finger from the toad.

  “What you’re feeling is its anger,” his aunt said softly. “It blames you for its death, and it’s trying to get back at you the only way it knows how, by hurting you. Course, it’s a small spirit without much power, and so it can’t do much damage. Hurts less than a bee sting, doesn’t it?”

  Michael nodded. “I didn’t mean to kill it, though. It was an accident.”

  “You and I know that, but the toad is just a poor, dumb animal. All that it knows is that its life has been taken away and you were the one that did it.”

  The pain between his eyes began to grow more intense. He tried to pull his fingers away from the toad, but he couldn’t. It was like he was glued to the animal.

  “It’s starting to hurt worse, Aunt ‘Lena.” He couldn’t keep the fear out of his voice.

  “Don’t you worry. A little old toad spirit can’t do you any real harm. And you can make it go away anytime you want.”

  “I can?”

  Aunt Elena nodded. “Close your eyes and imagine that your head is covered by something. A blanket, or maybe a hat.”

  “How about a helmet, like the kind my army men wear?”

  “That’ll work fine. Now go ahead: close your eyes and imagine you’re wearing a thick, green army man helmet. A helmet so strong that nothing can get through, not even the pain that little toad ghost is sending you.”

  Michael did as his aunt instructed. It wasn’t easy to ignore the pain between his eyes—it was starting to spread, and felt more like a headache now—but he did it, and imagined the helmet so well that he thought he could actually feel its weight on his head. Within seconds, the pain began to lessen, and soon it vanished entirely. Michael was able to withdraw his finger from the toad then.

  He looked up at Aunt ‘Lena and smiled. “I did it!”

  She grinned, wrapped her fleshy arms around him and gave him a hug. “You sure did, Mikey! And anytime you’re pestered by a spirit that you don’t want bothering you, you go ahead and imagine up your army man helmet, and you’ll be just fine. Now let’s see about giving this little toad a proper burial, all right?”

  * * *

  Over the years, Michael had learned that his army-man helmet only worked so well. If a spirit was strong enough and determined to make itself heard, there was only so much you could do to shut it out. But the spirit-whispers that were plaguing him at the moment were primarily background noise, and the helmet image worked well enough in concert with the music. And if the whispers didn’t recede entirely, at least they were muted enough to ignore.

  He continued on toward Ashton.

  * * *

  He pulled his Beemer to a stop a dozen yards from Elena’s trailer, parked, and cut the ignition. He sat behind the wheel for several moments, making himself ready. The trailer—which Elena had named Holly, for reasons that he’d never been clear on—sat at the end of a dirt path not quite wide enough to be called a driveway. Its green and white siding was tinged with rust at the edges, and the wooden front porch, which he had built and painted over one summer between seventh and eighth grade, was weathered and seriously in need of repainting. The grass was high; it had been a while since she’d mowed, but not so high that the yard looked neglected. Trees surrounded the property on all sides, taller and thicker than he remembered. When he was a child, the trees had made the place seem cozy, safe and protected, but when he’d become an adolescent, they’d been stifling, a cage made of brown, gray and green. Now, they were just trees.

  He took a deep breath, held it for a count of three—just as Elena had taught him—and let it out slowly. Telling himself that he felt calmer now, though in truth he didn’t, he got out of the car and started for the porch. Branches swayed in the summer breeze, their leaves shusssshing against one another, the sound overlaid by birdsong and cicada-thrum. He listened for the whispers, but heard none. It was almost as if the dead had paused in their eternal gossiping, watching and listening to see what would happen next.

  He walked up the front steps and onto the porch, turned toward the screen door, half-expecting Elena to be standing there waiting for him. After all, she had to have been aware that he was coming home. But she wasn’t there. He started to knock, then paused. Elena would chide him for knocking, would tell him that no matter how long he’d been away, no matter that he hadn’t called in months, this was still his home, and he didn’t have to knock as if he were some stranger come to sell her something.

  He opened the screen door and stepped inside.

  The heat hit him first. Elena hated air conditioning, said it made the air taste wrong, but she didn’t like to open the windows in summer, said the humidity made everything feel damp and caused mildew. Next came the smell, a mingled odor of cooked meals, flowers on the verge of rot, and lemon-scented furniture polish. Last, he heard the low tones of a television program drifting from the living room. A man’s voice, the cadence rising and falling, almost like he was chanting. Michael couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t need to. Elena only watched religious programs on TV, and the man was undoubtedly a televangelist.

  The trailer’s front door opened on a small dining room that Elena hardly ever used. The dining table was covered by framed pictures of family, the older pictures to the rear, the more recent ones in the front. In back were photos of his mom and grandparents, and Aunt Elena’s husband—all long deceased. There were no pictures of his father. The man had taken off months before he was born, and had never returned to Ashton. Ther
e was a good chance he was probably dead now, too, not that Michael gave a damn. If the man’s spirit ever tried to talk to him, Michael would give him the old army helmet treatment. If his father hadn’t wanted anything to do with him in life, Michael sure as hell wasn’t going to start a relationship with him in death.

  To the left of the dining room was the kitchen, to the right the living room. Michael went right.

  Elena sat in the recliner he’d bought her with money he’d saved from his first job as a professional medium when he was sixteen. He’d worked as a “spirit-reader” at the county fair one summer, though he’d told Elena that he was cleaning horse stalls at the Johnstons’ farm. Elena didn’t believe in using their gifts for personal gain, and while she had clearly disapproved once she’d found out where the money for her new chair had come from—and he’d suspected she’d known all along—that hadn’t stopped her from accepting his gift.

  He wondered how she felt about what he did now. His television show, The Other Side, was one of the most popular programs on cable, its ratings high enough to impress the networks, and there was serious talk of syndication. Since Michael was a co-creator of the show, that meant mucho dinero. And though his aunt had never said anything, he was pretty sure that in her mind, it counted as exploiting his gift for personal gain.

  She sat staring at the TV, a white man in an expensive suit with a mound of blow-dried blonde hair atop his head stood behind a wooden lectern, talking about the glory of serving Jesus. His face and voice exuded an overly practiced sincerity that couldn’t disguise his true message: Give me money.

  “Don’t be so cynical,” she said.

  Michael smiled. As irritating as it was to never be able to hide his feelings from her, it was also comforting in its way. No one else in the world knew him as well as she did, and no one ever would.

  She was thinner than when he last saw her, though not exactly a scarecrow. Her white hair was cut short and straight, the edges a bit uneven. He wondered if she’d taken to cutting her hair herself. The whites of her eyes were tinged yellow, and he wondered if that was a sign of some serious medical condition. Liver trouble? Gall bladder?

  Her hands rested on the arms of the recliner, the joints of her fingers bulging from arthritis, or as she’d always pronounced it, ar-thur-itis. She wore a simple striped shirt which left her arms bare and a pair of orange shorts. Her legs were a road map of varicose veins, so thick and discolored it looked like a colony of fat, purple earthworms had burrowed beneath her skin.

  She gestured toward the couch without taking her gaze from the television screen. “Go ahead and sit down. Unless you’re not planning on staying.”

  Michael did as she ordered, having to pass between Elena and the TV to do so. He sat down, wishing he’d worn something lighter than the black shirt and slacks he had on. He’d only been inside the trailer for a few minutes, but already his skin was slick with sweat, and his clothes stuck to him like a second layer of flesh.

  Time passed without either of them saying anything. Michael found himself watching the televangelist so he wouldn’t have to stare at his aunt’s face. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, but which Michael knew had only been moments, Elena spoke again.

  “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The darkness.”

  Michael nodded.

  Elena took a deep breath, held it for a three-count, just as she’d taught him to do, then released it slowly. When she was done, she turned to Michael, gave him a smile and held out her arms. “Well? Are you too big a TV star to come give your old auntie a hug?”

  * * *

  “So what was it? I mean, I’ve made contact with the other side hundreds of times, but I’ve never experienced anything like that before.” Even now, outside in the light of the late afternoon sun, the thought of that awful darkness made him shiver and raised goose bumps on his flesh.

  Elena didn’t answer at first. They walked side by side, his aunt holding on to his elbow with her left hand. Her feet were covered by a pair of slippers that were hardly appropriate for outdoors, but she’d refused to put on shoes, saying they pinched her feet. They were walking through the woods, on a well-worn path that Michael knew as well as the layout of his condo back in the city, even though he hadn’t set foot here in almost fifteen years. He wasn’t sure where they were going. After they’d chatted for a bit, mostly small-talk about nothing in particular, words designed to get them used to each other again and to stave off discussion of the real reason he’d come home, she’d suggested that they go for a little walk. Michael, without saying so directly, had hinted that maybe it was too hot out for someone of Elena’s years, but she’d ignored him, and now here they were, walking in the woods, Michael fearing that his elderly aunt would have a heart attack or a stroke any minute.

  At least it was cooler here than inside that oven of a trailer.

  “The departed ever give you any sense of what the other side was like?” she asked.

  Elena had never referred to them as dead or worse yet, ghosts. She’d always used terms like spirits and departed, the latter always sounding to Michael as if they’d just stepped out for a quart of milk or a pack of cigarettes, and they’d be back before long.

  “Sure. People ask all the time when I do readings.” It was one of the most common questions he got. After someone asked if their loved one was okay on the other side, they always wanted to know what the afterlife was really like. “I always get a sense of peace and togetherness from…the departed, as if on the other side we’re reunited with our loved ones that have passed over before us, and everything is all right.”

  He looked at his aunt. “Do you know what it’s like? I mean, you never said much about it, but I always assumed you believed in the Christian version of heaven—angels and saints and all.”

  Elena smiled. “And you didn’t, which is why you never asked me, isn’t it?”

  Michael felt himself blush. It was almost as if his aunt had told him that she’d known all along what he was doing in the bathroom with the water running so long when he was a teenager. “Well, it just never felt right to me, you know? And you always told me that I should trust my feelings.”

  “That I did.” They walked in silence a bit before Elena went on. “I wish I could believe in the storybook version of heaven. I wish I was like most other people in the world: blind, deaf and dumb to anything ‘cept what’s in front of my nose at the moment. But I’m not.”

  The trees began to thin, and Michael knew they were coming to the edge of the woods. He knew what lay beyond, but he didn’t want to think about that just now.

  “I knew you had the gift the first time I laid eyes on you as a monkey-faced little baby.” She gave a snorting laugh. “Good thing you got handsomer as you grew up. After your mother…passed on, I made sure to teach you everything you’d need to know to be able to live with your abilities, and maybe be able to use them to help other people some day.”

  Was there a gentle rebuke in her last sentence? Elena had given readings for folks all her life, but she’d never charged them much, just enough to cover the cost of food, phone, and electricity, and even then she’d always had trouble paying her bills. Since leaving Ashton, Michael had become something of a celebrity, and while his cable TV show wasn’t making him rich, he charged five hundred dollars for a one-on-one reading, more if the client was wealthy. Paying bills was not one of his problems.

  “You taught me well, Aunt ‘Lena.”

  “I did my best, and I think all in all you turned out okay.” She grinned, but then sadness filled her eyes and her smile fell away. “But there are a few things I didn’t tell you. Things you weren’t quite ready to hear back then. Things you may not be any more ready to hear now, but I don’t have a lot of choice about telling you.”

  Elena’s voice was soft, her tone cold and flat, and it cut through him like a blade of ice. “Like what?”

  She looked away, and her eyes glazed over, as if she were focusing on something far in the
distance, something only she could see.

  “Well, for one thing, the dead are liars. Every last one of them.”

  * * *

  They were past the woods and into a clearing, waving grass almost knee-high. To the west a low wall of orange brick surrounded row upon row of small weathered gravestones. The wall was only three, three-and-half feet high, easy to climb over. Michael should know; he’d shinnied over it often while growing up. There were trees in the cemetery, oak and elm; tall, old things with thick branches and lush green leaves that gave shade and shelter to the dead, not that they needed it. Michael had the impression the trees were watching as he and ‘Lena passed by. They seemed more curious than malevolent…and somewhat smug, as if they knew more than he did about what had drawn him home.

  A gentle breeze blew from the north, and Michael detected a sound beneath the wind, something like an ocean wave breaking against a deserted beach. Deep, sonorous, more felt through the soles of the feet than heard with the ears. The dead weren’t bound to their physical remains, but their bodies made effective focal points for contact, and places like this, where their cast-off shells were gathered, were the psychic equivalent of a strong telephone connection.

  Aunt Elena chuckled. “Seems like they get noisier every time I walk by.”

  Michael smiled. “Maybe you just keep getting better at listening.”

  She laughed, a rich, hearty sound that could have originated in the throat of a much younger woman. “So now it’s your turn to teach me, eh?” She grew suddenly serious. “Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is.”

  It had been years since Michael had been this near Elmwood. It was a Quaker burial ground erected in 1864, and most of the folks laid to rest within its walls had been there so long that time and the elements had scoured the legends from their gravestones, rendering them anonymous. There had been only few fresh graves dug over the last half century. In fact, the last one had belonged to his—